Offshore oil platforms operate at ever-greater depths

A big British oil company, BP, announced cost cuts and measures to be more efficient on March 2nd because they hope to increase annual profits by $3 billion over the next few years. Along with BP, other big oil companies face the same problem when it comes to booting profits-- There has been a lack of discovery of new, cheap oil fields. Because oil fields that are easy to reach and worth drilling from a cost perspective have not been being discovered, firms want to look for oil even deeper below the sea. Since 1994, offshore oil wells have been reacher further and further into the sea. This year, Shell's Perdido rig is going to begin operation, as tall as the Eiffel Tower and chained to the seabed 2.4km below, capable of extracting oil at a maximum depth of 2.9km. Compare this to the first offshore oil well in 1947 that was able to drill 4.6 meters into the seabed.